Friends of Lowell Foundation (FOLF) formally requested a meeting with Mayor Daniel Lurie and senior City Hall officials, citing alleged violations of the California Brown Act in the San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) adoption of the controversial “Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey” curriculum. The legal letter, which included 53 pages of legal attachments, asserts there is “a pattern of deliberate lawbreaking at SFUSD, and it is no longer reasonably in dispute.” It seeks a discussion with the mayor, education, and policy staff, and representatives from the district attorney’s and city attorney’s offices. The request follows an earlier demand letter to the district and Board of Education, which preceded the abrupt departure of SFUSD’s legal director.
FOLF board member Alisa Farenzena reiterates,“The city government sends roughly a quarter of a billion dollars per year to the SFUSD, which in return gives us ongoing budget deficits, declining enrollment, and repeated violations of California’s Brown Act. We’re asking the mayor to engage now — because, if these failures continue, the imminent public scrutiny and consequences for our students will be significant.” Although the Board of Education and Superintendent Maria Su do not report to the mayor, City Hall controls significant taxpayer funding to the school district. Friends of Lowell is urging City Hall intervention on SFUSD transparency, independent evaluation, budget stewardship, and students’ civil rights.
On April 28, 2026, the Board of Education voted 6-1 to approve a roughly $7 million, five-year contract making Voices the district’s standardized, permanent high school ethnic studies curriculum.
The full textbook remains unavailable, and only a hard copy is reviewable at SFUSD headquarters. Requests for on-site reviews remain restricted to short intervals during limited business hours.
SFUSD paid $147,000 to the Los Angeles-based Education Leaders of Color (EdLoC) to oversee community input sessions over two Saturdays in March. The two moderators, Andrea and Ebony, introduced themselves from an organization called Social Studies Accelerator, where Andrea is also founder and entrepreneur-in-residence at EdLoC.
The review committee consisted of 16 ethnic studies teachers, 15 other SFUSD educators and staff, and eight San Francisco parents. Each parent was assigned roughly to a table of four, with the other three members of the table being SFUSD employees (for example, principals, vice principals, and others). There was always an ethnic studies teacher assigned to every table. It’s unclear how the SFUSD educators were selected, but an overwhelming majority seemed familiar with the ethnic studies curriculum and were mostly in favor of it. Individual scores, from 0 to 3, were averaged out per table. Thus, a parent’s score of zero was almost always diluted when the table’s composite average was submitted.
Parents were granted roughly one Sunday and five weekdays to review the Voices curriculum. It was the first time that parents had seen the full Voices textbook. Working parents faced even tighter constraints in conducting a meaningful examination.
Moderators made clear from the outset that Voices was the only curriculum under consideration and that none of its content would be subject to evaluation or revision. They instructed the room to holler “content” if any feedback veered off-topic, addressed the material itself, or failed to align with the scoring criteria of a narrow, detailed four-point rubric.
In the textbook’s introductory section, ninth graders are introduced to a “Power Wheel” diagram, adapted from Sylvia Duckworth’s Wheels of Power and Privilege. The wheel prompts students to identify where they stand across overlapping categories of identity, including race, sex, gender, religion, income, immigration status, and more. It explicitly frames characteristics such as White, European, cis-male, Christian, Settler, high-income, and citizen as conferring greater power and privilege, while positioning other identities as marginalized.
Parents have strongly criticized the framework for presenting contested critical race theory concepts as undisputed fact, especially to incoming freshmen who have yet to complete foundational courses in U.S. history, civics, or economics. There appear to be plenty of examples of oppression in the Voices textbook, and when pressed, why there are no success stories, the counter-story response is that privileged powers permitted it as needed, high-level control remained with the powerful few. Ethnic studies is meant to foster critical thinking, but the curriculum itself presents only one side with few examples of minority success stories for analytical comparison.
The review committee made clear that the Voices course embodies “liberated” ethnic studies, explicitly designed to create social justice activists, rather than conventional multicultural studies intended to expand knowledge. This orientation is consistent with comments made by an SFUSD ethnic studies teacher during the Aug. 26, 2025, Board of Education meeting, where he told a packed audience that the class aims to “create warriors,” while wearing a keffiyeh scarf.
